De kogel is door de kerk. After years of focussing entirely on Gtk+ and GNOME, Ubuntu will finally start evaluating Qt applications for inclusion in the defaukt Ubuntu installation. Mark Shuttleworth announced the policy change on his blog today.

Sorry, but I can only interpret this one way and it's the same message that Mark Shuttleworth has given for years that has always ended up in nothing of very much significance happening:

Nevertheless, should a KDE app learn to talk dconf in addition to the standard KDE mechanisms, which should be straightforward, it would be a candidate for the Ubuntu default install.

What this means is that if a foreign application does things the way that we want in a way that we've already decided then we'll be happy to dangle a carrot of inclusion into Ubuntu.

Not helpful, in other words, because whatever way you choose to see it that is dictation in any language - or at least attempting to dictate.

They've obviously now seen the error of their ways over the years with their development platform and path. How much do you want to bet that they end up being wrong over this shoehorned approach until they either change again or go bust?